Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancestors, awen, bardic, Bardic rant, consciousness, cosmology, creation, landscape photography, memory, Poetry, Taliesin, time, trees, vision on April 24, 2021| Leave a Comment »
Because of their words:
A quantum entanglement.
Whether equation or story,
The ripples vibrate.
All metaphor is truth.
All truth, metaphor.
So said Euron.
So said Eurwys.
They wrap the bones
Of space in pictures.
Weave timelessness
With heroes.
By means of language
And of matter
They fashion magnificent trees,
The span of universes,
A melodious ocean.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, Autumn, landscape, nature, Poetry, stormy weather, trees, Wales, wind on November 17, 2020| 4 Comments »
THE TREES
.
the trees have
become skeletons now,
.
this year’s flesh
stripped off by storms.
.
we are becoming the dead
And breathe
that spice perfume
Of cold and
mulch and sleep.
.
the wind lifts the skirts
of the morning.
.
we see nothing there
except clattering bones.
.
all our neat
and sensible power
evaporates.
.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Ancient Welsh yews, art, attributes, Cambrian Mointains, contemplation, deity, meditation, Mynyddoedd Cambrian Mountains, Otherword, photography, Poetry, power, sacred yew, the numinous, the yew tree, trees, Wales, yidam on August 12, 2018| 1 Comment »
YIDAM YEW
As though through the bark
The tree remembers
every storm
Every wild sunset.
every dream of fleeting light captured, savoured.
Every rip tide and cloud race, every
Second’s shade and bright reveal.
A mad visionary truth,
The taste of an ultimate, near ultimate, real,
Stretching and scattering certainty of form and view.
—
At its heart is a red darkness,
a blue darkness,
a glow of orange sunrise and sunsets,
a weight of waiting
and a weight of watching.
–
It will see you looking at it
through your own eyes.
It will measure the coming and going of your breath,
and know that it is dreaming.
–
Those who name it,
do not know its name,
which began at the beginning of things
And will continue beyond their ending,
and then will not be completed, even then.
–
Though there is a snake hiss silence,
though the spine fills and hollows with dust,
though one moment shatters in black light,
though there is a taste of pollen and old books,
though there is a stutter thought,
though there is a window or a mirror.
–
A perfect dance of stillness,
a perfect song of silence,
a filled void that drowns and opens out.
A cease and a spinning.
Location lost.
A reorientation in a million shards of shadow shimmer.
Wordless is the wisdom of compassionate beasts.
–
Whetever form it takes,
it is light and time and endless mind
Stretched out in sunlight, flowing as wind and rain,
A map of constancy, road to all things.
–
‘Yidam’ is the Tibetan word for ‘meditational deity’. It has energetic presence that encourages awakening and is dressed in a form and metaphor that excites attention. Like all deities/spirits/thought forms, it is paradoxically illusory and of an independant existence more real than the individual personality could ever be. ‘Wrathful’ deities have the appearance of dynamic, fear-provoking, fiery forms that destroy illusion and false concepts.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape.Wales, Poetry, St. David's Day, storm, trees, weather on March 1, 2015| Leave a Comment »
ST. DAVID’S DAY
This storm is born
In the crowns of the big trees.
See them, down in the valley fold,
Sway and surge in sea-echoed ecstasy.
The roar of threaded airs
Woven and slung out,
Spat with hail and sudden squall.
Dark their limbs,
And dark the thick air.
But bright the song of the chaffinch.
Bright the morning
And the baby’s cries on the cliff.
The sun shall lift the hills
And praise will rise.
Tonight, the owl’s amen shall resound
As round and cold
As the clear moon.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ancient trees, churchyards, history, landscape, photography, Poetry, Powys, time, trees, Wales, yews on August 30, 2014| 4 Comments »
LLANHIFANGEL ABERGWESYN
Heather, royally purple, clothing the hillsides above.
Around the circles of Llanhifangel Abergwesyn,
The silver, sanding shores of Irfon, curved and rippled.
Sheltered from sheep, this round silent shield
Is where they are gathered, where they are splintered,
Where they are woven.
United, divided, leaning into the storms of Time.
Hausers swinging between centuries
Binding sun and earth, to heaven, even.
Knitted light revolved and spun,
Wheels in wheels, a thousand eyes
Open and closing, a blink of orbital rhythm.
These trees, these towers, these castles roaring upwards.
Ladders of chant and silence,
Spilt shade.
Bow ye down,
Bow ye graceful between the gravestones,
Flaked and moss green.
Bone and mind incorporate,
Reawoke, voiceless and benign
In speckled sunlight, sublime.
—
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged landscape, photography, Poetry, Powys, Saint Llywel, time, tree spirits, trees, Wales, yews on August 27, 2014| 11 Comments »
YEWS OF LLYWEL
1
Older than theologies,
Blood grail holder
A taste of cinnamon and rust.
He would have stood here shaded,
Llywel, eyes following your dark spirals,
Hands and back against your rough dragon skin,
Watching the rain sweep in across the valley trees.
The little stream growing loud then quiet again,
The nod of measowsweet and hawkweed,
A thick, potent prayer tasting on his lips.
2
Lidless, you seeing yews,
Eyes fast on eternity,
Shrugging off days and years.
Time, (even), kneels down in your shade
Forgetting all but this one moment,
Head bowed, long-veined hands
Like the valleys of the Epynt,
River full and throbbing green,
Bending seawards, bending to the lowlands,
Bending to the silence, to the confluence of breath,
An instant of clarity, wordless, bubbled, weightless.
The chambered heart, rope and sinew,
Knotted, released, a stretched tympanum quivering.
One vowel, one consonant, one tree.
3
My tongue a rolling mist,
A down feather aimless,
Unable to approach nearer
The in and out of your mighty, inexorable breath.
Time’s golden apples fall ripe and fall rotten,
Lapsed thought imcomprehensible.
A simple vastness, single, resounding,
A parliament of photons.
Woven thickly, red, hard, etched water.
A held swirl, thirled moments,
Nailed, transfigured, an apotheosis
Beyond good or bad, beyond purpose,
Beyond meaning,
An etymology of divinity.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged art, book, deep ecology, healing, japan, Japanese Trees, meditations, techniques, tree spirit healing, trees on November 19, 2013| 3 Comments »
BLURB WORDPRESS link
Hopefully this is a link to a project I have just completed using Blurb templates. If it works, this is an ideal platform for me to produce most of the work I have been doing with Tree Spirit Healing over the last twenty years or so. The fact that there will be only a few people interested in this stuff is not my main concern, it is just nice to get a lot of texts and related artworks into some other medium other than idiosyncratic ones and noughts. These books will be the most cost effective way to collate and embody most of my recent artworks. I do have the facility to print high quality archive images that occasionally sell and go to good homes, but this is quite an expensive process, even to make my own copies.
I am currently working on several other volumes of Tree Spirit Healing books, some in this format, some in others, checking out possibilities and variables. So far poetry books haven’t been completely controllable (though there are a few ideas I have had recently to try to stabilise errant spacing and lines, which I must try out before they slip my mind again…
Please take a look if you have time. From a mass publishing/popular bookstall point of view these books are not cheap. But then again, I am used to buying academic specialist volumes for fifty, sixty, seventy pounds sterling….
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Beltane, coolness, green, landscape, light, May, May-eve, nature, peace, Poetry, summer, sunlight, trees, warmth, woods on April 30, 2013| Leave a Comment »
print of ‘Light of Beltane’ created from tree and other plant spirit symbols
*****
THE COOL GREEN FIRES OF BELTANE
These wild mad-eyed men
Fire burning souls, heart-clawed:
Let them cool and rest
Under the dapple of trees,
Let them silent learn to smile,
Let them melt a little
Considering this fragrant air
sufficient, replete.
Breeze-filled, bird-filled,
A hammock for goodness.
Let them drop their hunger,
The carving of empires,
The bitter profits of belief,
The fierce ambitions for more.
Let them love their sons and daughters
And let them remember the open woods.
Let them not fear heaven nor hells
But let them halt and watch
The small things gather, delighted,
Learning the blessing of trees.
Let the heart melt in May,
Let the skin warm, flesh relax, soul unfurl.
For there is a glory to find beneath all things
And it shall shine through
Enough for any,
Enough for all.
Life under trees.
Let the mountains remain open
Let the valleys be all in green shade
Comforted, rocked, whispered.
For there are sufficient deserts,
Howling emptinesses we need no more of,
No more cleansings nor clearings
Nor impositions of sterile order.
Let the heart melt into May,
The cool green fires of Beltane.
Let the soul, with the souls of all, unfurl,
The branching year blossoming.
Beyond is the cool airs turning warm,
Beyond is a place to rest completed,
Beyond is the dream of violet shimmer
The hum of summer, the nest of light.
Under trees, cooled, dappled, blessed.
*****
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ash, aspen, belonging, birch, branching, breathing, creation, heart life, Home, immanence, landscape, morning, nature, oak, photography, pine, place, Poetry, remaining, rowan, Scotland, separation, silence, Skye, the house of trees, tree spirit healing, trees, yew on January 28, 2013| 4 Comments »
13
Equation
Belonging and separation
These, the truth of all relating.
Belonging and separation,
These, the fabric of all existences.
Belonging and separation:
The biology of being
The song of the heart
The engine of thoughts
The migration of souls
The tide of peoples
The stick and goad of leaders
The yearning of lovers
The fear of death.
Staying in one place:
The rowan, the birch
Taking up, letting go,
Bending to withstand rain,
Rising in springtime.
A blessing to all
A curse to none.
The house of trees
Ever remaining.
I breathe in
The wood of my own making:
The spliced double oak
Of my lungs
Shattering separation,
Drawing in life to life.
Feeding the forest
Of my blood, a red tide
Whispering the twin rivers
Of extension and return.
My own yew and alder,
Heart life, deep-rooted.
A dream of trees,
This world.
A home of trees.
A house of trees,
An open sanctuary,
A boundary of contentment.
The bright tumbling birches-
I breathe their fluid lightning,
Sucked in to my belly.
Spinning, revolving, sweeping away
Sorrow, liquid atonement,
A clarity of spiral song,
A reverberation of pure note.
I breathe in the star snow of rowan,
A descent of clustered frost,
Rock-borne, persistent.
A waterfall descent of night
Shot through with sparks of song.
A tumbled universe
Bridging beginnings and ends.
A resonance of watching silence.
I breathe the resin air of pine,
A seed of taste on the tongue-tip.
Awakened presence, reminder of place.
I breathe out the distant glimmer
Through the centre of my eyes,
Arrow-straight, target-less,
Horizon’s endless pull.
The tree of memory.
The tree of branching thought.
I breathe the sweep of ash,
The straight, silent spear tip of it,
Key to all houses.
I breathe the shattering quiver
Of aspen the whisperer.
A fountain of echoes,
Shaking each nerve tip
With rippled delight.
I breathe without movement
A perfect balance of oak.
Remaining poised,
Certain stitch, well held.
And I breathe a pool of yew,
Contracting, expanding, bubbled time,
A well of silence,
A well of time.
Half here, half elsewhere,
The dancers know that tune
Of leaf and root, galliard of the seasons.
The slow inhalation of moments,
The gnat-cloud of thought
Dispersed and reformed
In new pools of sunlight.
The house of trees:
Allowing the dark,
Allowing the stillness,
Acquiescing to gravity
And the yearning for light.
Placed, established, settled.
Whilst we,
Free to wander
But rootless and unsatisfied,
Busy to hide the doubt of silence,
The insistence of other questions.
Always running away, scurrying.
Better stories
Awaiting beyond.
It is time (surely) to
Attain a place,
An open view,
learning to remain.
Over the hills of Knoydart
The clouds have settled.
Dawn stills the waters
Between Raasay and the deep wood.
Distilled essence,
Liquid morning.
All roads and paths
To elsewhere
Are empty.
The house of trees:
A beginning and an end
Of remembering.
simonhlilly 